How SAP Concur helped BEUMER to Streamline Its Travel & Expense Management

BEUMER Group is a parent company headquartered in Beckum, Germany. It is a Euro 1 billion+ group in the material handling space with five different business segments that deal in both discrete and bulk material handling. BEUMER India is 100% subsidiary of BEUMER Group. There are over 350 people in India. The office is headquartered in Gurugram with a regional office in Mumbai. BEUMER India wanted to improve its efficiency and streamline travel & expense management.

Challenges

"Earlier, most of the expense management was done on an excel-based template, which was time-consuming and difficult to track and analyse. There was a deluge of mails that were being exchanged, hence increasing the process. Also, people were submitting their expense claim in a hard copy to the finance department as per the tax requirement which was further becoming a challenge as well as increasing the paperwork. To avoid this cumbersome process, we were looking for an automated, digital expense management solution that could meet and ease our requirements,” said Keshav Dubal, IT Head, BEUMER India.

“Our services are all over world and many of our employees work remotely and therefore travel extensively. Efficient travel and expense management is crucial for our business and SAP Concur’s travel and expense tool is a wonderful solution to all our needs. It is employee- friendly, efficient, accurate and smart,” he further added.

Selecting SAP Concur

While researching the various Travel & Expense (T&E) tools, BEUMER learnt about the efficiency of SAP Concur tools. After exploring various expense management tools that were available in the market, the organisation decided to go-ahead with SAP Concur owing to the high-level of customisation that it offered. Additionally, the team also spoke to existing SAP Concur customers who shared their positive experience.

Why SAP Concur?

• Automatically records and reports
• Time-saving
• Increased control and visibility into travel spend
• Increase efficiency and accuracy in travel and expense processes and reporting

Implementation and Adoption

BEUMER India rolled out Concur Expense across all its employees 10 months ago before going live on February 1, 2018, 350 employees use this tool for all their travel and expense related to business.

Their checking claims cycle timing has reduced drastically. Almost 90% in terms of human intervention has been reduced post the implementation. On a 6-month comparable basis with the corresponding previous year, they have been able to save 2 - 2.5 % of the travel expenditure because of higher compliance requirements & expense category visibility. The workflows have become smooth, requirements among the employees have become better and a lot easier for the finance department to check details.

Realized Savings

BEUMER employees were previously using traditional formats like excel sheets to record their expenses. “With SAP Concur’s extraordinary solution, we can now monitor expenditures and avoid redundant procedures. Our employees are thrilled with the hassle-free way of reporting expenses as it saves a significant amount of time.

The additional benefit that we saw at SAP Concur was its mobile-based application. It would facilitate our site employees also to make a ready access and submit their claims online without any hindrance,” said Rajnish Magan, CFO, BEUMER India.

Business outcomes: Compared to previous solutions

Time-saving: Approx. 30% time & productivity savings

Increased control and visibility into travel spend; Much better Control & Expenditure visibility in Diff Travel Heads

Increase efficiency and accuracy: Yes this has led to better accuracy & enhanced compliance

Cost saving: On a comparable basis of previous period in CY 17 our savings in CY 18 are approx. 3 % in first 6 months of implementation